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This thread is a new sticky that will record my upgrades to the site's look, feel, structure, features, and design. Some updates may be very small, while others could be very large.

Now onto my first update:
*Created a season review templating system that will allow me to painlessly construct a season review. This will play a nice role when I put together the rest of my Season 6 Review (which, by the way, is in its initial phases and I hope to work on a lot this weekend).

In light of the above, I have converted all my existing season reviews to this new format. You shouldn't notice any visual difference with the exception of the "collapse/expand" button added to the top of each section. Also, links throughout the site are no longer underlined by default. They only become underlined when you hover your mouse over them. This conversion also has the benefit of allowing me to change the formatting of every season review from one CSS file. This could allow for site "themes" down the road.

Upcoming site upgrades:
*Make every aspect of the site use a similar templating system to that of the season reviews. This includes revamping the regular review templates, and converting all existing episode reviews to use this system. Once this is complete, site themes, as mentioned above, will truly be possible. This will also allow this site design to easily be used for different television shows (with different reviewers) that could look very different from my site, despite using the same code.
*Ad support and potentially a donate button. I mentioned this before in a news post. I'm going to introduce a small amount of ads to the site in an attempt to create a little bit of extra revenue from my time invested in it. I'm thinking about having one medium-size ad on the right-hand side of the page, and possibly some text in between a review and a review's comments. I hope to keep all ads unintrusive and related to Buffy and/or Whedon. This will be a process over time that will require some tweaking. Feedback will be encouraged.

In addition to these site upgrades I'll, of course, be writing the Season 6 Review. Some of these upgrades may be released before the review, while some may come after. But I hope to have all of them complete before I begin episodes of S7.

I also hope to do another podcast after I've gotten started on my early S7 reviews.

Thanks to all of you for continuing to visit this site and make it the community it is today! As always, please feel free to offer feedback and/or suggestions (in this thread or elsewhere).

*All regular episode reviews (including "Restless" -- that one was built special, but now can be easily built from a review template) have now been converted to a new, much more dynamic, templating system.

Feature-wise, this can mean that, when creating a new review, I can add more sections beyond just "Review" -- such as "Old Review" or "Addendum." I plan to do something like this when I re-review S1 later.

Also, I can do stuff like having a particular section "collapsed" (or "minimized") when you load the page, thereby partially hiding it unless you really want to see it.

If you notice anything weird-looking in any review, please let me know so I can correct the problem. These large-scale changes can often cause a few odd bugs.

Tomorrow I plan on working on the Season 6 Review, while on Monday I'm going to get back to site templates.

I've had a busy work week so I haven't gotten much done as of late. But I have made progress on my Season 6 Review. Unfortunately, I don't see any way it will release before Christmas. There's a sliver of a chance it could make it out before the end of the year, but don't get your hopes up.

Hey all. Site update here.

In the last few weeks, I've accomplished the following:
*Templatized the news and archive posts. Note that I've discovered today that some recent changes I made to the site have not taken so well on certain browsers. When I get home from work today I plan on correcting these issues.
*Templatized the splash image and links/buttons at the top of every page in the site
*Ads have been placed on most pages throughout the site. The nature and placement of these ads will likely vary, to some extent, as I fine-tune the best bang for the buck with the smallest reader instrusion. In a nutshell, the way these ads work is as follows:
-Google Ads: If you click on an ad, I get money. Simple as that.
-Amazon Ads: If you actually BUY the product you click on, I get a small % of that sale.

I'm wrapping up this round of site updates over the next few days. By this weekend, I plan on getting started on my S7 reviews. There's a chance my review of "Lessons" will be out by EOD Sunday.

Thanks for your patience with these upgrades. I assure all of you, though, that the time spent now will lead to a LOT of cool stuff in the future.

More site upgrades!

*You can now leave comments on articles! Additionally, the "Today's Comments" page will pick up, well, today's comments in every single article on the site.
*Everything on the site has now been re-coded except for the about.php page, the reviews.php page, and all the "Review Extras" pages. Once I get these remaining pages cleaned up, I'll be looking into providing an option for a lighter color scheme for those who'd prefer dark text on a light background.
*Updated the Links page with more relevant links and descriptions.

My site upgrades are nearing completion; I've successfully re-coded the majority of the site. A couple of features came along with this broader update:

*A brand-new color scheme switcher at the top-left corner of every page of the site. Click on the "Light" link to view the site with dark text on a light background. Click on the "Dark" link to view light text on a dark background (the default). Whatever style you select will be remembered by the browser the next time you return.
*Improved review navigation. On every episode review, you now have access to the current season review on the right (which will be crossed out if it hasn't been reviewed yet), and the previous season review on the left.
*Several smaller updates that should make your reading experience on the site that much better.

The last thing I plan on implementing before completely focusing on pure episode reviews is a nice improvement to the comment system. This involves adding a "preview" button for comment submissions.

Rejoice! The comment system has gotten a very sexy upgrade! You know that "preview" button that some of you asked me for a long time ago (and that sites like Whedonesque have)? Well, your wish is my command -- you now have a preview button for your comment available on all reviews and articles. You can spot this button right next to the "Add Comment" button.

In addition to this feature, I've rewired the code behind the comment system to use AJAX technology. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. What this means to you, gentle reader, is a much better user experience that allows you to post a comment (or a preview) without the need for the entire page to reload itself -- AJAX allows for partial page rendering. Now, when you add a comment, it will instantly appear without a page refresh, and the page will jump to the top of your comment so you can verify it got posted. When you post a preview, it will also jump downward to make sure you can view the top of your preview comment.

Please let me know if this does, in fact, enhance your experience with my comment system, and definitely shoot me off an e-mail if you encounter any bugs and/or quirks with it so I can get them fixed asap.

Please note that I have only tested this new system on Windows 7 with the following browsers: Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 1), Firefox (v3.0.6), and Google Chrome (v1.0.154). I've also had success in some tests I did with IE7 on Windows Vista. I hope to expand this list myself in time, but if you encounter anything that does not function as I've described it, please let me know! Thanks!

This feature pretty much wraps up the site features I intend to develop myself. Most of the site has been re-coded from the ground-up and is now not only a much better experience for the administrator (i.e. me), but I hope also for you, my dear readers.

Thanks!

I also wanted to make sure everyone's aware of the new site search feature. If you go to,

www.superjer.com/buffy/search_site.php

This page is linked to in the top-right corner of every page on the site, as well as in the "Review Extras" section at the top of the root Reviews page.

You can search all of my site and Ryan's Angel site for content you're looking for. This feature is powered by Google AdSense, although I configured it to mesh with my site. Please feel free to use this as much as you want.

I'm proud to announce that CriticallyTouched.com now fully supports RSS feeds! I finally got fed up slamming the "Today's Comments" page about a thousand times a day. lol

So, here's the info. In general you can always find the feeds by the RSS icon () placed at convenient locations on each page of the site.

For the NEWS feed, click on the icon in the top-right corner. This icon is site-sensitive and will give you the news of the site it is on. So clicking it anywhere on the Buffy site will give you a news feed just for the Buffy site. Same for Angel. However, if you click on the icon on the main http://www.criticallytouched.com page it will give you an aggregate news feed of all the sites in the network (currently only Buffy and Angel, of course).

For the COMMENTS feed, you'll find a larger version of the same icon on every review or article at the top of the Comments section (it will be on the right). You can also find the icon on the Today's Comments page. This icon is also site-sensitive, so if you click on it on the Buffy site you'll get the feed for all the Buffy comments while if you're on the Angel site it will give you all the Angel comments. There's no aggregate link for comments at this time, as I didn't feel it would be terribly useful.

I mainly did this for my own convenience, but hopefully some of you will benefit from my laziness! I think it's pretty cool that the site now supports Facebook, Twitter, and RSS! It's finally growing up. Haha.

Enjoy!

P.S. Here are the direct links if you want one place of reference.

NEWS:
Buffy - http://www.criticallytouched.com/buffy/rss_news.php
Angel - http://www.criticallytouched.com/angel/rss_news.php
Entire Network - http://www.criticallytouched.com/rss_allnews.php

COMMENTS:
Buffy - http://www.criticallytouched.com/buffy/rss_comments.php
Angel - http://www.criticallytouched.com/angel/rss_comments.php

I've added the ability for each review and article to display a Last Updated date below the published date which is updated every time that piece of content is modified. This tag will not appear at all if no modifications have been made since it was originally published. Note that content has been modified before, but I wasn't tracking it then, so this functionality only applies to content modifications from now on.

I just got rid of the 'P' as 'Perfect' grade. It has been replaced with 'P' as 'Platinum' and is shown with a special badge rather than the score of 100, which is no longer a viable score on the network. This change was made primarily to clarify the purpose of the P grade and further define it as not meaning a literally perfect episode.